January 2014

My text on “fixing the internet” from two weeks ago triggered an inspiring online discussion with Michael Dlugosch, through which kind of a working hypothesis has started to emerge for me. In a first attempt to paraphrase: The question of how to create/restore a more open web providing control over one’s own representation hovers around three core issues: identity, content, and audience. It needs to be considered how an independent identity is being established, how users control their content and how they can build and cater to an audience despite independent ownership of identities and full control over content. Not quite coincidentally, the discussion has touch points with debates going on in many places. [...]

The archives reveal it was October 2005 when I started to use Delicious to collect my bookmarks, at a time where I had to use various computers daily. Four years later, competitor Ma.gnolia lost all user data, marking the first occasion that I (along with a shaken community of their users) questioned the value of cloud services for storing personal data. Yet, both for lack of alternatives and for being lazy, I kept using Delicious - though making regular backups a habit. Today, we live 2014 and it is time to move on; more specifically, time to reclaim ownership over my bookmarks and to host them myself. Naturally, having grown used to a cloud service, a suitable web-based replacement had to be found. [...]

Within the last year, and increasingly during recent weeks, a recurring theme in writings from web design commentators has been that the web is in an unhealthy state and needs some care. Maybe most prominently, Anil Dash's "The web we lost" from November 2012 is a wake-up call to everybody working with the web to recall where it originally came from and the opportunities it provided. More recently, Jeremy Keith has summarised the debate in his article "In dependence". [...]